Wikitubia:Interviews/ReignBot
This interview was conducted via email on July 15, 2017, by HanselElGato. ---- ReignBot is a YouTuber with over 737,000 subscribers. ---- Personal message for ReignBot, from HanselElGato: Thanks for accepting my interview, and I just want you to know that I love your content, I hope you stay on YouTube for a long of time, or atleast keep doing videos, and your my favourite YouTuber, thats it. Q1: When did you discover YouTube? * Pretty much when it first came out. Back in 2005 I was mainly using it to look up music and interviews with artists I enjoy. Q2: Why did you decided to become a YouTuber yourself? * Being a “YouTuber” was never really the ultimate goal, I simply wanted to make videos for fun. As a child I would spend a lot of time making short horror or horror-comedy films, and once I got to high school I started getting into photography and videography. I really didn’t do anything video related after that since I was focusing on art, so I saw YouTube as an opportunity to revisit the medium. I first started writing out video ideas in late 2014, and by February 2015 I had uploaded my first video to the ReignBotHorror channel. Q3: What is the hardest thing as a YouTuber? * I think there are pros and cons to every job. Personally, I find the most difficult thing is being a one person team. In most traditional jobs—even media related ones—you’re simply one component in an overall bigger picture. If you get sick or don’t show up for work then things more or less still carry on. With something like YouTube all the weight falls on a single person unless you’re one of those channels with a team behind it. I choose to work solo, so there is a price to pay for that—but it is worth it in my opinion. Q4: What was your favourite video to make? * The viewers aren’t necessarily aware of this, but there are certain videos I plan ages in advance, and some videos that are made within the same day I found out about the topic. Those more spontaneous videos are always the most fun to me. I find a story or topic that I just have to talk about, then 8-12 hours later a video on it comes out. As for recent stuff, I think the most fun I’ve had was with the two videos following the “Time Girl” situation. As soon as I found out what was going on I immediately made a video and kept on top of the situation with fans live as it developed. Q5: How did you came up with the idea of making your series of things you should not google? * I’ve always been a very curious person, so this has led me to some very strange pockets of the internet. I was thinking about the old days of YouTube reaction videos—back when it was just the person’s reaction and you couldn’t actually see what they were watching. 2 Girls 1 Cup was a popular one, for example. The reaction videos that came out of that were comedic gold. Given the reputation of that video and things like it, it was often advised that if you had never seen it, then you don’t want to Google it—classic internet culture stuff. Anyway, stuff like that made me think of all the crazy things I’ve seen online before, and I figured it would be a fun idea to make a countdown video about them. This was back when I was mostly experimenting with my channel, and I had never really done a list style video before. The Google series was a happy accident for me. It was never meant to be a series—in fact, the first video barely got any views until around five months later. That’s when I decided to make more, and they quickly blew up and became something that I was somewhat known for aside from my debunk and analysis videos. Q6: So far, is your goal of keeping YouTube creepy achieved? * It’s difficult to say, actually. Keeping YouTube creepy bears different meanings to different people. To some it means not being demonetized, to others it means not being age restricted, then there’s the whole issue about horror content that is monetized but receives major cuts in ad revenue. Of course, these issues aren’t isolated to just the horror community on YouTube—the ad situation hit everyone. My approach to keeping YouTube creepy wasn’t really about winning back our revenue. What I wanted to do was to encourage horror creators to not quit or abandon projects because it seemed YouTube wasn’t favoring us. That really wasn’t the case—we just happen to have content that not everyone is comfortable with. There was no attack from YouTube on the horror community itself. Times change, and if we want to keep doing what we do then at some point we do need to learn to adapt and roll with the punches. So far, the fans have been keeping horror channels alive via donations and merchandise sales, so it seems those with enough hustle are going to be sticking around. The “adpocalypse” was a good lesson to online creators about the importance of diversifying revenue streams. Q7: Everyone has being asking this question since a lot of time ago, what is the reason you quitted YouTube for a while, and why did you come back? * The first thing I want to be clear about is that I did not leave because of the advertiser boycott. What a lot of people don’t realize is that I stopped posting videos weeks before the ad situation broke out. I was already on hiatus and seriously considering not coming back. As for why—well, that’s very complicated. In my video announcing that I was leaving I stated that it was due to personal reasons. This is true, and in order to spill the details on that I’d have to publicly speak about some very intimate issues in my life. I am human, not just some video making machine, so I hope fans will understand why I didn’t go into too much detail about the situation. To put it simply, there were things changing in my life and I was forced to consider if YouTube was still a path I wanted to continue on. I have other interests and passions that I’ve dedicated a lot of time to. YouTube was never my ultimate goal in life, and neither was making videos. A little before I quit I had to ask myself if maybe the YouTube chapter of my life was over and it was time to carry on with whatever the next thing was. As for why I returned—it took quite a bit of self-reflection, but I quickly realized that I still had things to say and topics that I wanted to explore on my channel. After I quit I found myself alone at my computer writing down topics I thought were interesting, then I realized I had no place for these thoughts to go—that’s what the channel was always for. As far as I’m concerned my time on YouTube isn’t over yet, and won’t be any time soon—but there really is no way to tell when that next chapter of my life will come. It may be sooner, or it may be later—we just have to wait and see. Q8: Who is your favourite YouTuber? * I don’t have a single favorite YouTuber, but if I had to answer this I would say Rhett and Link. They’ve been around forever and evolved and adapted in some very impressive ways. I think a lot of online creators worry about what happens when their “thing” gets old—Rhett and Link are a great example of how that won’t happen as long as you keep things fresh and experiment a bit. Q9: Why did you choose to talk about disturbing and morbid topics? * Like I said earlier, I’ve always been a very curious person. As a child I wanted to read books about real-life instead of fiction. I personally found it a bit insulting that the adults didn’t think we could comprehend anything more than a Dr. Seuss book. I was always very fond of horror movies and eventually started to wonder about what inspired them. There was a point in my childhood where I shifted from consuming a lot of horror fiction to watching documentaries on serial killers and other true crime related content. This continued on into my teens where I started a lot of heavy reading on the topics. When I was 15 years old someone did bring up an interesting question for me. A friend had asked what I planned to do with all the information I gathered from my reading and whatever else I looked up online since I spent so much time doing so. He made it sound like I had acquired somewhat of a useless talent, so it did give me something to think about. By the time I was feeling that itch to make videos again, I naturally had to ask myself what theme would work best in the long run. Horror and the macabre were things I knew I’d never get tired of, so it became the subject I chose to stick with. Q10: Why did you choose to talk about disturbing and morbid topics? * It’s really difficult to say. I can tell you that I’ve become somewhat desensitized to it all. I remember the first time I ever saw a beheading video on the internet. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen until my late teens. I was always fine with looking at crime scene photos or aftermath stuff, but I wasn’t so interested in watching a human being killed on camera. Anyway, several years ago there was a cartel execution video that was floating around on Facebook. It showed up in my feed—I believe on autoplay—so I saw it without warning. That one stuck with me for quite some time, but I wouldn’t be so bothered by it if I saw it today. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still terrible and leaves me feeling emotionally exhausted, but viewing things like that has become easier since the creation of my channel. Aside from that, I’d say anything involving the deaths of children. I also hate watching anything where you can hear people screaming or crying out in agony. This is why I find the raw footage of 9/11 so troubling. I also have an incredibly difficult time listening to the audio of that one video where a brick breaks through the front windshield of a car, striking the woman in the passenger seat. You don’t actually see what happens since the dash cam is facing outwards, but you hear the husband and other passenger cry out helplessly. It hits even harder when you realize the woman didn’t survive and the two other people basically witnessed a Final Destination style death up close. Q11: What is your ultimate goal on YouTube? * When I first started I would have been happy with just 10k subscribers since it was really just more of a hobby. Once I realized I had somewhat of a fan base growing then the ultimate goal became 100k subscribers. I’ve surpassed that now, so I’m guessing the eventual next big milestone would be one million, but I’m trying to focus less on numbers and just have fun with whatever I put out. I do eventually want to make appearances at conventions, but it isn’t time for that just yet. As of now I really have no clue where this YouTube thing is going. Q12: Well you ever change of subject on your channel? * No, but I am open to trying new formats. ReignBot will always focus on the darker things in life, but these days I’ve also been experimenting with more comedically driven content. My channel has always been so serious and sometimes rather bleak, so I felt that a slight change of pace would work well for both myself and my fans. So far the shift has been well received, but that doesn’t mean I’m getting rid of the old stuff. Q13: Did you had any YouTube channel before ReignBot? * Yes, a couple—but they weren’t meant to be official YouTube channels with the goal of establishing a fan base. My old channels were just a place for me to upload random film projects from school or whatever I was working on independently at home. These channels no longer exist and I unfortunately don’t have any of my old material saved. These channels were active around 2008-2010. Q14: What is the worst incident with a fan or a hater? * I can’t say anything all that terrible has ever really happened, actually. So far it’s been pretty much your standard stuff. I think I’d describe it as annoying more than anything. There was this one crazy dude who started out as a fan—or at least a viewer, anyway. He saw my video discussing a channel called Deeper, which was known for using actual cold cases as part of an ARG. For some reason he took this as proof that there was in fact a killer on the loose, so he started commenting and trying to rally people together to track the person down. Once he realized that Deeper wasn’t necessarily real he got angry with me and claimed that I took a hyperbolic stance on the matter in order to gain views. We went at each other for a bit after be posted angry comments to my social media, and I expected it to be over with but then he decided to upload a video ranting about me to YouTube. He came up with this theory that I was somehow behind all the channels I covered, and that it was all a scheme to generate traffic. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the flaws in his logic there. I can’t say this was the “worst” thing to happen, but definitely the most mind-bogglingly stupid. Q15: Did any of YouTube new rules affect you? * Just to clarify, YouTube hasn’t exactly created new rules—they’re simply enforcing them in a much stricter manner than they did in the past. The advertiser issue is something else entirely, but it does contribute to the headache most of us on YouTube are feeling now. To answer your question, yes—very much so. Since my channels deals with such dark topics I often have to deal with demonetization left and right. The videos that remain monetized make very, very little now. To be frank, I’d be much more financially stable if I had quit YouTube—but as I said, this chapter of my life isn’t quite over yet, and I’m very much willing to sacrifice a bit to continue it. I’ve been a fool for lesser things. Q16: What was the hardest video for you to make? * That’s a bit of a tough question. I currently have a newer series called Morbid Reality where I take true crime cases and other real-life topics and discuss them. I knew for a long time that I wanted to do something like that, but I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to format it. For the pilot episode I decided to cover snuff films and red rooms—the overall killing on camera thing. I was aiming to release that video during my 200k subscriber special, but I bit off way more than I could chew. Most of my videos are rather short, anywhere between 3-7 minutes long. I barely ever go over 10 minutes, but this video was double that and had a deadline I really didn’t want to miss. Anyway, I ended up slicing the video into two parts which I felt pretty shitty about doing. The entire process behind that first episode was painful. Q17: What do you think about the deep web and all of the ridiculous hoaxes about it? * One reason I love horror films is because despite the fact that they’re based in fiction they do tap into societal fears. The same thing can be said for online horror, or any other form of the genre, really. Given that the internet is such a common thing now it’s natural for people to be afraid of parts of it that they aren’t familiar with. Most people probably don’t know the deep web exists, they stick to Facebook and YouTube, for example. When you tell someone there’s more to it, something secret—something hidden right under their noses, then you’re bound to arouse some interest there. What I’m trying to say is that I completely understand why the deep web is such an effective tool for horror; however, what’s not so great about it is the misinformation that comes along with it. People are afraid of things they can’t see, so they make things up, imaginations run wild—sometimes it makes for a great story, sometimes it makes people stupid. I think it’s up to the individual to do their homework. Sure, I can enjoy a tech related horror story just like anyone else, but it’s important to separate fact from fiction. Q18: How many views did your first video have when it first came out? * Gosh. My first video was this absolutely terrible rambling thing talking about a Creepypasta. I had 0 subs when that came out, so technically it had no views at all for its initial release. I did quickly meet a handful of other small horror YouTubers at the time who were my first subscribers. So, I’d say it got around 10 views during the period of time where it was considered new? Those were tough times. Category:YouTube Interviews